English Essay about Rhetoric

An excerpt "Rhetoric – what it is; why needed" from Jacques Barzun's "Simple and Direct: a Rhetoric for Writing" is a perfect piece of work, determined to inspire those, who intend to write professionally and turn this sometimes painstaking process into a skillful interplay of words and ideas.

Jacques Barzun is a venerable master of words himself, as one can judge from the excerpt that is not only vividly written and easily read, but gives a reader the determination to carve the words more carefully and to become a better writer no matter what. The author clearly has the talent to make the power of words serve him properly and the charisma to turn the dullest topic into an enjoyable reading.


Barzun’s idea of good writing includes careful word choice, correct underlining and punctuation, and, more importantly, sound criticism. Any writer should keep in mind the target reader, his general ability to percept ideas through word symbols. Making the words "do proper work", as the author puts it, is a result of hard work and abundant reading of good books. No matter what the subject is, the text could take the reader’s breath away by means of proper tone, rhythm, word selection, sentence structure, text composition and general suitability.

There is no great difference between fiction and scientific research paper as long as they reach the goal set by their authors. And it is the writer’s responsibility to make writing an effective instrument of making ideas settle in the minds of readers. Working with words, meanings and other ways of turning thoughts into literary pieces is both interesting and rewarding, because this skill is useful for many other life purposes.

Jeremy Bernstein's "Einsteins of Wall Street" tells the story men whose ideas and activities shaped the economic world of the second half of XX century. The author himself is a well-known physicist and scientist, and along his scientific career he had an opportunity to meet numerous prominent scientists and theorists in different fields (not only physics). In his article, Jeremy Bernstein shows how various fields of science that at fist sight do not seem to have anything in common, appear to be so closely connected that have similar theories or formulas. In this case, the fields closely interrelated are quantum physics and financial engineering. The latter uses the formulae and concepts that are based on the notions of “Brownian motion” and findings of Albert Einstein.

The brokerage business that gained enormous popularity in the second half of the previous century demanded theoretical basis for hedging and selling securities and derivatives. The Nobel Prize winners Myron Scholes and Fischer Black, created the famous Black-Scholes equation, that was later commonly used in stock options evaluation, and shared the award with Robert Merton, who provided different approach to the same problem. Further on, these prominent theorists were recruited by nonetheless outstanding business units that dealt with financial engineering and analysis. Further development of scientific findings in the field led to the creation of the analogue bond-option model (BDT model). Such great success in theoretical approach did not fully recur in practice. Merton and Scholes were recruited by John Meriwether, the founder of Long Term Capital Management, the hedge fund that played key part in grievous 1998 financial crisis. And although life taught the financial engineering wizards that the market is sometimes irrational and the best predictions become meaningless or wrong, they still have good reputation that can hardly be cast down, despite millions of losses incurred.